


Whoever He Was

by WakingNightmares



Category: X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Torture, Medical Experimentation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-26
Updated: 2019-06-26
Packaged: 2020-05-20 09:51:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19374283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WakingNightmares/pseuds/WakingNightmares
Summary: Scott wasn’t sure how much of him was actually him.It was a sad statement, to be sure. But true regardless.He’d had so many damn telepaths rooting around in his head, some careful, some not so much, that his internal psyche was nothing more than a jumbled ruin of a once stately house.





	Whoever He Was

Scott wasn’t sure how much of him was actually him.

 

It was a sad statement, to be sure. But true regardless.

 

He’d had so many damn telepaths rooting around in his head, some careful, some not so much, that his internal psyche was nothing more than a jumbled ruin of a once stately house.

 

Anything involving his earliest memories had been systematically destroyed; burned, or simply torn away by Nathaniel Essex. Scott could never be sure how much of the little he did remember was real, and how much was his brain scrambling to put pieces together in some semblance of order.

 

Looking back at it, Scott had come to the conclusion that, as bad as the experiments were, the psychic damage was worse. What Essex had called ‘experiments’ were little more than brutal torture, true, but physical injuries heal; the memories of the events fade with time.

 

The psychic damage had destroyed pieces of himself that he couldn’t even remember existing. The first ten years of his life -his parents, his brother, their house in Alaska -were little more than a jigsaw puzzle with more than half the pieces gone. Even the Professor had told him there was little that could be done to recover the missing pieces; that it would always be a half-formed picture at best.

 

The pieces Winters had went after… Well, the man had only been a minor telepath, but it’d been enough for him to understand all of Scott’s greatest fears, greater than Scott himself understood. All of his fears of abandonment, of loss, of having everything he knew ripped away from him… all magnified, until it filled entire portions of his psyche. While Jack might not have played with his brain the same way true telepaths had, the memories of that time were just as devastating.

 

Because unlike Essex’s experiments… Jack was cruel to be cruel. There were days when he’d beat Scott bloody for staying in his room, and days when he’d break bones if Scott dared to leave his room.

 

Again, when he looked back on it, Scott could -from an emotional distance -understand why his memories there were so fractured. He’d been recovering from what Essex had done to him, trying to gain his footing, only to be discovered by a man whose strongest trait was his inconsistency. He kept Scott in a constant state of unsurety, never sure how he was supposed to react, or what he was supposed to say. Added to the damage Essex had done, Jack Winters had nearly destroyed Scott -more nearly than even Essex himself had done.

 

Then came the Professor. While Charles’ interfering with his psyche might have had good intentions, it was simply another foreign invader as far as Scott’s inner defenses were concerned.

The Professor might’ve used the doors, but he went invading regardless. The end result was yet another telepath fiddling around in what was already the proverbial minefield.

 

Scott could easily identify the portions that Charles had been in. All rough edges smoothed away, broken debris removed, rooms entirely sterile despite their innocent appearance. No trace of Scott existed in those rooms, despite the Professor insisting that those same rooms belonged to Scott now.

 

He was almost positive that most of who he is is the result of Charles’ interference. The man had tried to dull the horrors that Scott had experienced, to take some of the bite out of them. The result had been to remove any real sense of empathy Scott might have developed from those memories, any sort of character building he might’ve gained. Instead it was simply something that had happened, no different, really, than when he’d broken his arm in the Danger Room.

 

And while, yes, Charles had taken away his nightmares -nightmares that had woken the entire house as he screamed in agony -he’d also taken away his dreams. While to some, it might have seemed like an even enough trade, for a boy with nothing and no one, dreams had held a special significance. They’d been the only thing he’d had, for a time.

 

Jean… Jean had been a part of everything. No matter where he went, he could feel Jean’s presence. While she’d been one of the few telepaths in his life to respect his privacy, and not go snooping, she’d helped teach Scott how to shore up his own defenses. How to claim parts of his psyche back, how to make them his own again.

 

She’d journeyed with him through the unknown parts he dared to travel, a constant steady presence by his side, as she helped him rebuild, and restore. While much of his past was still a scrambled blur to him, Jean had helped him reclaim enough that he thought -maybe -he could eventually figure out how much of him was him, and how much was the three male telepaths in his life.

 

Then Jean had died. The first friend he’d ever had, the first person who’d shown him kindness, and gentleness, had died. Leaving her fingerprints all over his psyche, in every inch of the spaces he traveled, that he used.

 

Funny how the one telepath who’d respected his privacy, who’d mucked around the least, was the one who ended up hurting him the most.

 

So he’d stopped his forays into his innermost psyche; stopped trying to piece the puzzle back together. Without Jean’s help, he’d never discover who he was, and he knew that.

 

So he’d continue being the man that Essex, Winters, and Xavier made him. Whoever -or whatever -that was.


End file.
